 Drink spiking is the grim phenomenon of men slipping drugs into usually women's drinks in order to sexually assault them It's always been a disgusting and brutal crime and there are now stories emerging of men using new methods to commit this abuse by Injection there have been reports in the past few weeks of multiple women believing. They have been drugged via needle when in nightclubs Zara Owen is one of them. She is a student in Nottingham and spoke to the BBC about her experience Last Monday night, actually I went out with my friends to a nightclub in the city Nothing more than what we would usually do I remember going in Having going to the bar going to the toilet with the photo booth and then up until that moment My memory is a blank until I get home and I'm getting my phone charger I know I didn't drink as much as I usually would on a night out this night And the fact that I don't remember anything it's terrified for me because This is something that is a very rare occasion to me I've never suffered with memory loss and then the next morning Obviously I did with the memory loss. I woke up with a really really painful leg So you had a what you had some kind of bruising. Did I didn't want any bruising or anything? But I found a pinprick in my leg. Well, which was the epicenter of all pain It made me unable to walk and I was limping around Which which was the only form of support I could really have is it was it's so much agony That was Zara Owen describing an incident at a club called prism the Guardian report of another young woman in Nottingham Who had a similar experience in a separate incident days earlier a woman who was in a club ten minutes from prison Believed she was spiked in a similar manner The woman also 19 and a student felt a pinch on the back of her arm as she left stealth nightclub on the 12th Of October her sister said she later blacked out and was taken to A&E where she was put on drip and underwent blood tests And a 20 year old man has been arrested for possession of and substances We think in in relation to these but nothing as yet has been confirmed as far as I can tell No one has been found with with a needle But all sounds really horrible Darlia, this is I mean, this is just hideous isn't it? Oh, it's it's horrifying It's it's really really grim stuff You know the phenomenon of women having that their drinks spiked in clubs You know, it's it's a tale as as old as time. Unfortunately. Obviously, this is a kind of new development or more is a very old story and I think what this really shows us is that a lot of the Conventional wisdom advice that has been given on this particular issue really doesn't get to the heart of the matter You know for so long every sort of young woman every sort of teenage girl has been had it drummed into her Before she starts going clubbing or partying or whatever, you know, be careful of your drink make sure not to leave your drink anywhere You know, don't leave your drink unattended always keep your eye in it Don't accept a drink from a stranger, etc So now what can the advice be right like don't have legs don't have arms stay inside of your house Well, guess what your house is probably your home is actually probably not Statistically a super safe place for women either. So really we have this really shows us that we have to Radically change the way that we talk about gender-based violence We have to not only because we know this isn't how gender-based violence Operates you can't kind of game your way out of it. That's not really how it works But it also has this horrible undertone that kind of advice where it's sort of like Just protect yourself just keep yourself safe because the idea then is that if someone is in a club And it's so premeditated that they have a needle full of a substance that is Basically only there to spike up a woman's drink or to spike, you know to incapacitate her Then, you know, just make sure that you're not the one that gets caught just shift it on to someone else to another woman in The club or in the party and it's just like is that really the message that we want to be sending out here Or is is the message that we need to figure out what is driving these behaviors? What is driving people to do these kinds of things and and starting from there rather than starting from how? Women and people of marginalized genders and people who are vulnerable in other ways to these kind of behaviors can actually Rather than sort of focusing on what they should should be doing and it's it's so gross because it also Leads women who experience these kinds of things to internalize this idea that it's bad women It's incompetent women. It's women who didn't take enough measures who were reckless who were drunk It's those kinds of women that get assaulted It's those kind of women that experience violence and and good women cautious women women who you know follow all the rules Don't get assaulted and we know that that is not how we know that's a lie We know that's not how this works and so it's it's clear that we need to shift this conversation On to what actually is driving people to do these kinds of things and that doesn't mean more cops and bars We know that's not gonna make people safer especially when you know the cops are not exactly liable for no Kind, you know the cops are implicated in certain kinds of gender-based violence But it actually gets to we need to go to the heart of this matter and it starts from you know a culture that Uses sex and sexuality as a tool as a weapon as a weapon of power as a weapon of power Against women as a weapon of power against gendered minorities and even as a weapon of power against You know racialized men or men who are vulnerable to these you know sexualized violence and in other kinds of ways and obviously, you know It's an obvious one But the kind of culture that trivializes things like getting people drunk so that you can have sex with them That's kind of the the a different, you know sort of seen as a more acceptable end of this kind of logic But this is the kind of culture that means that this is the kind of behavior that people think that they they engage in So what this showed to me really is that the conversation around You know contamination and drug being drugged in in in clubs and in bars Has has always hit the wrong note because it's always focused on the wrong person's behavior the The reason this is headline news at the moment is because of this This suspected new phenomenon of people being injected with the drugs Everyone seems to be suggesting that it's incredibly rare. I mean there are many reasons to think it would be incredibly rare because It's it's quite risky going into a club with a syringe, you know If you get searched and and that gets found looks pretty dodgy, doesn't it? But this has raised a I think probably a well needed conversation about the extent of abuse which young women face Right now in this country. So One of those experiences was shared by lucy ward. She's a journalist And we had a viral tweet yesterday with a screenshot of a message from her daughter about drink spiking The daughter is in her first year at a uk university And we can have a look at the the tweet here Look at some of the sections of those messages, which she was sharing. So some of the key bits in that message were I know by name about half a dozen girls who have been spiked and more who suspect having been All others have horror stories some so gruesome They only share the mumps or years later One guy recently bought my mate a drink then refused to give it to her until she kissed him And when she said no, he poured it all over her There's another part of that message the injection thing is the most recent thing They're now doing and people are more scared than ever But the scariest thing to me is how unsurprised we all are we go out in groups. We refuse drinks We keep our phones on and in our hands girls are wearing denim jackets because the material is harder to piece We simply accept the latest horror and come up with new ways to protect ourselves And of course remain weak and vulnerable anyway Now I I do recommend Going to that tweet and reading out the whole message because it is really really horrific The terms in which this is all spoken about Um, I also now want to look at some potential resistance Um to this because the guardian reports that women are organizing in response to these incidents. So they report Groups from more than 50 universities around the uk have joined an online campaign calling for boycotts of night clubs Campaigners say they are seeking tangible changes to make nighttime venues safer Such as covers or stoppers for drinks better training for staff and more rigorous searches of clubbers A petition to make it a legal requirement for night clubs to thoroughly search guests on entry has gained more than 130,000 signatures since last week um Darling I want to go back. I suppose to those screenshoted messages And I suppose how awful that made it sound to be a young woman at university right now And I mean we it was not that long ago since we were undergrads I was wondering does it did that sound familiar to you when you sort of read that or do you think it's The experience has got worse Oh, absolutely and way before university. I mean this was my experience from school I would say from the age that I turned around probably 11 or 12 Uh was the first time that you started to get it would either come through, you know Things that would happen in the classroom or things that would happen in the street Or it would be the way that older women would would talk to you so things like you know being told Don't go home in your netball, you know uniform after school Be careful of you know, make sure that you do this make sure that you do that You know suddenly you start to get all those messages and you don't really understand them at the time But you start to get these messages from the top that you know the world out there is really unsafe And you it's your responsibility to protect yourself from that really unsafe world Which obviously massively reduces the quality of your life and your ability to feel free In the world that you you live in and that's something that begins way before undergraduate I think obviously, you know the beginning of university. It's a vulnerable time It's you know, everyone's sort of hashing it out on their own for the first time But I would say that there is a kind of problem here where we sometimes Exceptionalize these kinds of spaces we exceptionalize like the club or the bar is like the place where sexual violence happens and obviously There are particular risks and there's a particular way in which these risks unfold in nightclubs and bars But this isn't the only place where women experience gender-based violence It's not the only place where women experience sexual harassment, which is why again I just think that things like calling for more searching of people before entering a bar It just it doesn't really get to the heart of the issue because it still concedes That it's okay that our broader culture Operates on these logics where you know sexual harassment is just part of the course of growing up as a woman Uh around the world, you know, as I said earlier The home is one of the most unsafe places for a young girl or for a woman How you know, you can't really be frisking, you know Your dad or your husband or your uncle or whatever before every time he comes into the house Even though that even that wouldn't really make a difference. It's about the mentality and it's about the cultural logic That you know equates things like sexuality with, you know, exerting power over someone That looks at women's bodies as something that is, you know, essentially a public commodity a public resource to be commented on to be judged to be to have expectations around and that is the thing that needs to change not bumping up security in a club because The club is not the only place where these things happen and putting a bandaid on, you know, a shock on wound essentially doing that